Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, March 7, 1875. His father's background was Swiss and his mother’s was Basque, but he was brought up in Paris. Here he studied at the Conservatoire from approximately 1889 to 1895, returning in 1897 to study further with Faure and Gedalge. Ravel never married, but he did have several long-running relationships. He was also known to frequent the bordellos of Paris. During his schooling in Paris, Ravel joined with a number of innovative young composers who referred to themselves as the "Apaches" because of their wild abandon. The group was well known for its drunken revelry. In 1893, he met Chabrier and Satie, both who were influential to his future career as a musician. Ravel was also highly influenced from music around the world including American Jazz, Asian music, and traditional folk songs from across Europe. Ravel was not religious and was probably an atheist. He disliked the openly religious themes of other composers, such as Wagner, and instead preferred to look to classical mythology for inspiration. A decade later he was a well-known composer, at least of songs and piano pieces, working with great care he could imitate a composer such as Lisztian bravura, or a style li
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The Ballets Russes were also important in introducing him to Stravinsky and whose musical development he somewhat paralleled during the decade or so after The Rite of Spring. In 1937, he had an operation that he hoped would restore much of his health, but the operation failed and he died soon afterwards. In 1932, Ravel was involved in an automobile accident that severely reduced his health.
During the next decade, when he was in his thirties, he was producing most of his works. His last major effort was a pair of piano concertos, one energetic and multi-ethnic (in g major), and the other (for left hand only) more dark and stiffly single-minded. He was, he told me, against the death penalty always. The set of three Mallarmé songs with nonet (a musical combinations of nine instruments) accompaniment were written partly under the influence of Stravinsky's Japanese Lyrics and Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire. One event that he took very personally was when a criminal had been given the death penalty. The Prix de Rome was an annual award for a four-year studentship available to unmarried Frenchmen under the age of thirty.
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